Special Birthdays, Mother’s Day, War and Peace and A Blog Break – Little Loves

The last few weeks have been very busy here in wellies, with both our kids’ birthdays, a weekend away, a Harry Potter sleepover and of course most recently Mother’s Day. It’s also been a busy time on the writing front, and I’ve managed to reach 70,000 words on the second draft of my book, and almost 12,000 words on the piece I’m doing for my writing group (which I now think might turn into another book one day!) I’ve also been busy preparing for the John O’Groats Book Festival on the 5th to the 7th of April, where I’m due to be talking about blogging – and attending at various events supporting other writers. All in all, I’m really looking forward to the school holidays and keeping everything crossed for Spring-like weather. Aside from the odd nice day, the last few weeks in Caithness have been all about the wind!

READ

Thankfully, no matter how blustery it gets, I always have my trusty reading pile to fall back on. I had a quiet-ish reading month in March – if you’re interested, you can read all about that here. I did get a nice addition to my to-read pile for Mother’s Day though – a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace no less. Yes, an ambitious read even for me, but I want to have a good crack at it, having spent most of last month devouring the BBC adaption every time I had five (or sixty) minutes spare. Only about two years behind everyone else it seems, but I absolutely loved it, and fell so headlong into the story that I really felt I have to give the book a go. (And yes, I did drop a lot of hints in order to get this in my Mother’s Day morning bundle. Read ‘hints’ as directing males to bookshelves in Waterstones and telling them: ‘Buy this for Mummy please.’ It works!  😉 )

WATCHED

Apart from War and Peace, I had another epic to get through last month – Dawson’s Creek – the final season. Those of you who read regularly might remember that I bought the box set at the end of last summer and have been watching it on (and off – a bit like the characters’ love affairs), with much nostalgia ever since. I have to admit I didn’t enjoy the last two seasons as much as I remembered (I think a lot of the charm and innocence of Capeside life was lost when the characters moved to Boston, to be honest). But the final episode more than made up for that (and newsflash – 20 years on, I now think they probably did all get the right ending after all).  Except Jen of course. All the sobs on that one. And what am I going to do without the Dawson/Joey/Pacey love triangle? Post box-set existential crisis here I come….

HEARD

I haven’t been listening to many podcasts lately, but I do always like to check in on my favourites like the Worried Writer, The Creative Penn and Dr Chatterjee’s latest Feel Better, Live More episodes. Aside from that, we’ve been going old school, delving back into our neglected CD collection and nurturing our 12 year old’s growing Queen obsession by listening to their Greatest Hits on a near-continuous loop.

WORE

Last month, I got myself a pair of Nike Pegasus trainers for our weekly Parkruns (with the added small-feet bonus of fitting into juniors and knocking £50 or so off the usual purchase price). Whether it’s down to the trainers or not I don’t know, but I’ve had a good spell of running lately and managed to bag myself five personal bests in five consecutive weeks. When I think about how I was feeling about my health a couple of years ago, this makes me quite proud of myself to be honest (if you’d told me then I’d be managing a 5k run every weekend I wouldn’t have believed you one tiny little bit).

MADE

This month my making has been all about birthdays, banners and invitations. We had a Harry Potter themed sleepover for my eldest, and made this cake (along with scrolls and decorations – I might write about it all in another post sometime, for any of you Harry Potter fans). Next it was my youngest’s turn, and I churned out the same basic cake with a new topping (my repertoire is small and varies only in design and degree of wonkiness). The only problem was that as I’m gluten free, I didn’t get to sample either of them. Thankfully I have three boys on hand who assured me that they tasted pretty good!

AND FINALLY

As I mentioned earlier, it’s been a busy time lately. And as much as I enjoy doing lots of things I can’t help feeling I’m racing through my life without paying much attention to what’s actually going on. I seem to be jumping from one thing to the next without leaving myself any time to declutter – and I’ve also been struck by some of the things I read in Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism recently (you can read more about that here). I feel a bit worn out and frazzled and so I’ve decided to take a little blog break for the rest of April. After the John O’ Groats Festival, I’ll also be coming off social media for a while (you can still contact me via e-mail if you want to get in touch). So I’ll be back sometime in May, hopefully feeling refreshed, re-energised, and full of new ideas.

And with lots of Little Loves to share with you all again in the not-too-distant future.

Till then, Little Loves readers, I hope you have a lovely start to Spring.

Gx

Joining up with Mummy Hearts You and the Little Loves linky.